Please join Kelsey Street Press authors Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma for a reading on Saturday, August 28th at 5pm PST. In a time of dislocation, Renee Gladman and Metta Sáma tackle linguistic risks through form, language, and subject from one lyric utterance to the next to the next to reveal that like Gladman’s Ravicka, we too are “all dislocated and queer, strangers in a strange land—alien to others and, even, to ourselves.”
RSVP for the reading.
Metta Sáma's Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) swings from one subject to the next, from one lyric utterance to the next, concerning itself with unpacking myths of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. "Sáma's poems are visionary manifestos of the body boiled in Black Woman bloodline," Tyehimba Jess.
Metta Sáma is author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently, the year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs), and two full-length poetry collections, most recently, Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press). An award-winning poet, her poems, fiction, CNF, literary scholarship & book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. Sáma is the founder of Artists Against Police Brutality/Cultures of Violence, a Senior Fellow of Black Earth Institute and a member of the Advisory Board of Black Radish Books.
Renee Gladman's Kelsey Street Press books include Newcomer Can't Swim in 2007 and Juice, her first full-length book, in 2000.
Gladman is preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013) and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as two collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) and One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.
